Writing to know what I think.

A kind of living?

Picture if you can a man, middle fifties, riding a motorcycle across a lonely moorland road, the kind of road that’s barely wide enough for two cars to pass and has a grass strip running up the middle of it. It’s a Sunday evening, late summer, the sun about an hour from setting. He parks the bike at the wayside and sets out across the moor to the ruins of a farm – now just an outline of low gritstone walls, all overgrown, in the corner of a fertile pasture. The pasture has lain fallow for a long time – I mean, we’re talking a hundred years here – but it’s still lush green against the pale straw of the acidic, unsustaining moorland all around. He sits down on a stone, settles himself in. The evening is warm, the midges not too aggressive, the sun sinking lower now, sending long shadows out across the land.

He’s thinking about the his life.

He’s been here before, many times, but more specifically, he’s thinking of an occasion forty years ago, when he was a lad of seventeen, on his little motorcycle, a Gilera 50 tourer, at the end of the last long summer of his life, the summer he left school, and on the very evening before he took up a career as an engineering apprentice at a local manufacturing plant. He’d had the sense back then of a long road unwinding ahead of him, and though he couldn’t see the end of it, it had seemed as good a road as any, and he was happy to follow it.

It led him first of all to a reasonably well paid job as an engineer. He’d never be a millionaire, and he’d never drive a new car, but it was steady work, technically interesting, and so long as he was sensible, he would never be hard up for cash. Then he met a woman, several women in fact, married one of them in his later twenties and had a couple of kids by her – kids who were now grown and flown.

His memory of them is of summer vacations by the sea, of bedtime stories, of coaxing them through life’s occasional downer, and finally of college, graduation, of that awkward first moment, meeting their future spouses – then of losing them to the world and their own winding paths into the future.

He’d also lost his woman by now. She’d not been there for a while, emotionally anyway, not since the kids had grown, but recently she’d gone for good. Moved back in with her ageing parents, taken half their roomy house, and he was back to living in a middle terrace, exactly like the one he’d grown up in. It was fair enough, he thought. He wasn’t the most dynamic of characters and she’d grown bored with his mediocre ambitions – wanted to do something else with her life before she grew too old.

Then, after forty years, the managers at the engineering plant were looking to downsize and wanted volunteers for redundancy. If you were over fifty five it was a good package, and you could even go with an enhanced pension, not have to wait until sixty seven to draw it. You could have it now. So he took it. It had seemed the right thing to do at the time, sort of natural, what with everything else changing, coming to an end or transitioning away from him.

It had been a worry at first, wondering if he could get by, but he’d made some economies – like getting rid of the car
and going back to a small motorcycle. There’d be no more holidays in nice hotels in far flung places, but he’d never really enjoyed that kind of thing anyway,…

He’d be okay.

So now it’s Sunday night. And he’s contemplating the end of his working life, next week in fact, just as forty summers ago he’d sat in this same place, contemplating the beginning of it. And the question he’s asking, after all of that is what the fuck was it all for?

I mean, he’s not dead yet. He’s fifty seven, still reasonably fit, can still handle a bike, can still run five miles, and box the ears of younger men sparring at the Kung Fu club – and the Kung Fu’s keeping him flexible – no sense of himself growing stiff and brittle with age yet. Were it not for ample evidence to the contrary in the mirror every morning, he’d still say he was seventeen – well maybe not seventeen, but certainly no older than thirty five.

The kids rarely called on him now. There’s was no bad feeling between them, it’s just that they had their own lives to live, and they’d always been closer to their mother. He didn’t suppose he could expect them to make much of a fuss over him, and he didn’t expect them to, but at least while the kids were around he’d always had a very practical answer to the nagging question regarding his purpose in life – it was to help bring up the kids. everything else had been secondary.

But what now?

Well, there was always the writing – the stories, the novels. He’d been writing even when he was seventeen, laying out the first chapters of that very first novel, but it had never led to anything, and now forty years and twenty novels later, he didn’t think for a minute it ever would. It remained his number one pleasure in life, to sit down at his desk and tap out a fresh story, play around with some fictional characters, but the purpose of his life?

It was a strange business. At least he had readers now, thanks to the internet and the march of technology making it possible for everyone to have a book of his in their pocket – a thing that had been inconceivable when he’d started out – thinking he’d need to get himself a publisher – but they were always deeply puzzling to him, publishers, demanding the world of him before they’d even run their eyes over his manuscripts, and then offering nothing in return and for no explanation. They never did seem to like his work – at least not enough to pay him for it. Still, people wrote to him now and then, and said they’d read this or that story, people all over the world, people with their own lives, their own views on life.

That was something, and it kept him going.

Forty years!

The sun was slipping out of a pocket in the clouds now, sinking into the bronze crucible of the sea, and he was thinking he’d better get back before the midges started biting for real. But the house was empty and though he had financial security now without the need to get up every morning, he couldn’t help thinking he had no more in his life now than when he’d set out that Sunday evening at seventeen. At seventeen he had forty years of work ahead of him, forty years of life. But now all he could see was twenty years or so into which he could decompress before old age and infirmity took him.

Was that still a kind of living?

He fired the bike up and gave the throttle a twist. The engine sent out a throaty roar and he felt the vibration of it in his bones, but the silence of the moor was unperturbed – just swallowed it up. As he rode away, he took in the beauty of the hills like he always did when he came up here. They were russet now, the crown of the hills lit with gold splashes, against a deepening sky. They’d looked pretty much the same on that first occasion, forty years ago, as he supposed they would a thousand years from now.

That was the thing, being human, he thought. We tended to make such a lot of fuss over what amounted to not very much in the end. But on the upside, there’d be lots of long summers ahead, and the stories too.